To Wander Is to Learn
How Loose Threads Have Shaped Today's High Fantasy Landscape.
Kasia Flood
“In a hole there lived a hobbit.”
Recognize that line?
It’s lived rent-free in my mind for most of my life. Aside from growing up with a love of high fantasy, I’ve been forever enthralled with how it came to be, because it easily could have been forgotten.
“I did not and do not know why.” Tolkien to poet W. H. Auden in 1955.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a linguistics professor at Oxford University, grading papers when the idea struck him. He jotted it down in the margins of a paper, where it lived for over a year before it grew into anything more.
What was a hobbit?
Tolkien himself had no idea, but that question slowly nagged at him.
In 1931, he pulled the thread a bit further and laid out the opening chapter of The Hobbit. He envisioned Mr. Baggins bustling about a cozy earthen home to feed a dozen demanding dwarves as he mulled over the shocking concept of an adventure. Nasty things, really. Make you late for dinner.
After the first draft was complete, he let it sit.
Another year passed before he touched it again, and it took nearly three years to fully finish it. In 1937, the children’s classic was finally published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. and won the New York Herald Tribune prize within months.
That opening line of The Hobbit may be one of the single best examples of what I’ve been calling “Loose Threads” — fleeting ideas that come to mind sporadically, often without the full vision attached. Sometimes they spark instant inspiration that drives a compulsion to create immediately. Other times, they need to rest.
Like thread, ideas have a habit of getting tangled
Tolkien was an avid writer, but he struggled to create the requested sequel to The Hobbit. Letters to and from his publisher’s chairman, Stanley Unwin, demonstrated this clearly, with his time and mental energy frequently pulled in different directions by things like lectures on dragons, his poetry club, and countless short stories.
The Book of Lost Tales (what would eventually be published posthumously as The Silmarillion) had been started in 1916, when Tolkien first returned from the Battle of the Somme with trench fever. He continued it throughout the years, adapting it to fit within the same Middle-earth as The Hobbit, and submitted it as a companion piece.
It was rejected.
Unwin felt it was too scattered to meet the public’s demand. They wanted more tales of travelling hobbits.
But Tolkien felt he’d reached the end of what hobbits could reasonably achieve. They were too suburban to stretch much further without becoming a continuation of the same joke. He began to journey down new paths, with more dragons and orcs and good ol’ Tom Bombadil at the centre. Finally, he returned to the original concept with two new hobbits: Trotter and Bingo Bolger-Baggins. Trotter eventually became Strider. Strider turned out not to be a hobbit at all…
Not all those who wander are lost
My mind has a tendency to wander. It journeys down roads I don’t plan, often when I’m supposed to be doing something else. I can close my eyes and disappear into daydreams. Ideas flow most freely when I’m on the move or listening to music.
I first read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in Grade 6 and was gripped. My mind reimagined my favourite chapters over and over in new ways, exploring how each little change would impact the story. Slowly, they diverged so far that they became their own entire tales. I had new characters. Then an entirely separate world. I wrote them down every chance I could, even though the only ones who read them were myself, my mom, and my Grade 7 music teacher.
That love continued, with few lines capturing how my mind worked better than “not all those who wander are lost” from the Riddle of Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring. So much so that I got it tattooed on my 18th birthday.
Then, later that year, I took my first university English literature class and discovered Tolkien’s creative process. To say I felt seen is an understatement.
It wasn’t unlike that of his Oxford writing buddy C. S. Lewis, either. Or Stephen King’s. Or George R. R. Martin’s… Or R. F. Kuang’s.
In second year, I joined my first writing workshop and heard the same feedback echoed across the class. They’d start with an idea and let their minds wander to see where it went.
And as it turns out, this is not that uncommon. About half of the millions of people working on complex written projects fall under some form of “discovery” writing style, meaning they figure it out as they go. Experiential learning through the act of writing.
But we all shared a problem.
Ideas may be plentiful, but they’re also fleeting. They end up shoved somewhere quickly for safekeeping, only to create a sort of mental gymnastics routine when trying to find them all later. As you explore different directions and your world starts to grow… the connections can feel overwhelming.
That’s why I’m building Woven.
I’ve spent the past few months meeting with other writers to better understand their processes and how their ideas become the work they eventually publish. I want to identify where they stumble and what’s getting in their way.
Often, their hands can’t keep up with their ideas, and they end up stitching them together across countless different tabs and apps. Hours are spent updating siloed systems like whiteboards, wikis, spreadsheets, and different documents.
One writer I spoke with had master Google Docs linking out to 30 other docs for their worldbuilding. A few others were using Git to manage their different branches of thought. Another described their relationship with Word as “Stockholm syndrome” — they were stuck there with no better alternative, but the cognitive friction of trying to constantly align their spider-webbed thinking with the linear structure of a doc was painful. It was preventing them from getting into the flow and actually finishing anything.
Stop stitching and get weaving your story.
I’m presently opening Woven up to a select group of writers so they can test the features and share feedback on how it can be improved.
If you’re writing anything long-form and complex, like a novel or dissertation, please reach out! I’d love to get you weaving.
Disclaimer: This piece started as a Loose Thread called “A Tale of Two Writers” and focused heavily on the similarities between Tolkien’s and Lewis’ creative processes. But the piece diverged as I wrote it. The original remains safe in Woven, ready for whenever I’m ready to pick it back up.